Mke300/300d Mics (1 Viewer)

Although I am going for a ME67/K6 combo (as recommended by a professional field sound recording biologist ) I have the opportunity to get a Sennheisser MKE300 for a pretty silly price, brand new, and reckon this would ( should ) be a short term improvement on the MONOCOR shotgun I presently use, at least in signal quality / S/N ratio ?

Does any one else have experience of these mics for bird call recording, which are popular CAM externals I believe ? Do I need the MKE300D for using with a mini disc ( which has a capsule filter to cut out the noise of a Cam motor (?). I have never really experienced the motor drive of the MD writer being picked up before so don't envisage that as a problem. That mic is also considerably more expensive !

More importantly, any suggestions as to how to mount this jobby for hand-holding ? It has a male hot-shoe adapter. It really needs to be point and shoot for me, don't want it fixed to a scope or anything like that ( or a tripod ! ).

My own mic has actually served very well and was actually recommended by a RSPB researcher at Abernethy who used the same kit. I am sure the Sennheiser will not be THAT much better as reflected in the price differntial, but it does produce clearer signals.

Perhaps I am better holding out for the ME67 kit, but the MKE300 would also make a good robust back-up, 'roughing it' mic in the future.

Cheers,

Linz

griffin said:

Does any one else have experience of these mics for bird call recording, which are popular CAM externals I believe ? Do I need the MKE300D for using with a mini disc ( which has a capsule filter to cut out the noise of a Cam motor (?). I have never really experienced the motor drive of the MD writer being picked up before so don't envisage that as a problem. That mic is also considerably more expensive !

More importantly, any suggestions as to how to mount this jobby for hand-holding ? It has a male hot-shoe adapter. It really needs to be point and shoot for me, don't want it fixed to a scope or anything like that ( or a tripod ! ).

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I use a MKE300D for casual bird call recording. It works well. You don't need the D variant, as a typical handheld mic will be some distance from the MD, and MDs don't spit out so much hash as a DV cam. The lead on the 300D is curly and real short, but you need a capacitor in line to stand off the 3V MD plug in power else the connection is scratchy with DC on it. I built this into a small cylindrical box and use a 3.5mm extension lead. If you don't do that the use a 3.5mm extension cord and gaffer tape it. Then your signal will only appear on one channel of the HiMD. That's just the way it is with mono mics and HiMD - you'll have the same sort of issue on the ME rig.

for handholding I use a table top tripod (think 3" legs - actaully designed for mics to stand on a table) stuck into a piece of 22mm I.D. pipe lagging to decouple handling noise. If you use a photo tabletop mini tripod you will be able to screw it into the bush on the male hot shoe adapter of the mic itself - if you use a mic tripod with the 3/8 screw you'll have to bodge it with a mic clip which I do which is a right pain.

The 300D is already pretty ace on low handling noise due to the suspension within the housing. It's okay on noise. You will need a furry rycote 190D special windgag. The 300Hz rolloff is great for recording birds and dialogue but it will suck for music.. The pipe lagging trick makes the already low handling noise even lower, and this rig is cheap. A dowel and a stick-on hot shoe mount screwed to it instead of the minitripod would be even cheaper - I just had the minipod to hand

This is NOT in the league of the ME67. The noise is 18dBA versus 10 for the Me67. Do you really mean the ME67 and not the 66. Anyway, the rest noise of the 300 mic is more than twice that of ther ME. Sensitivity is down at 16mV/Pa versus 50 for the ME67/66 - almost 10dB down in signal level so preamp noise will be more of an issue.

And for all that it works fine as a quick go get 'em mic. It hasn't got the pulling power of a Telinga parabola, and it hasn't got the low-noise sensitivity of my MKH rig - but that is a set up on tripod and retire at least 20 yards else your breathing will appear in the mix type of rig. It has plenty of wallop to drive my MZ-NH700 to need the low-sens mic gain setting on a blue tit at 5metres. My main operational peeve is I can't aim anything which isn't in stereo. I can hear and locate the birds in the field by sound unaided and roughly aim the mic, but that's it - beats me how you aim a mono mic by monitored sound alone.

If you want a listen to some 300D recordings let me know.

Thanks for your comments.

I am going for the ME67 long-gun based on Lachlustres recommendation - if it works that well for Chaffies it will work well for Crossbills ! I believe this is more directional than the 66, and this will be better for targeting specific birds in a flock as well as a bit more reach. Don't fancy lugging a parabola around the glens and pinewoods, as I often trail 10+ miles and it is not practical what with the wind that tends to gust - the biggest source of noise on my recordings is rustling pine trees/needles, what a noise it makes, sounds like a bloody river or the sea !

My current mic has 15mV sensitivity/Pa on tele setting so is similar. However, the noise is 24dBA. I don't quite get what you mean about a capicitor in line - is that to simply to facilitate connection or is it having an effect on the signal eg. boost it ? Mono is no biggie as it is what current mic is, though I use a splitter to route the signal now into NH900.

My aim is to produce clearer signals for clearer sonograms, not Geoff Sample recordings.

Based on what you have said I am tempted, though might be better saving the cash for the K6 set. Will think about it for a few days.

Cheers,

Linz

If it's for clearer sonograms then you're probably best off going the whole way, particularly if you need the '67 for directionality. Not so sure about shotgun mics handling wind better than a dish though. I was out yesterday when they claimed the wind was about 8mph. It felt like 12-15 to me with a Teliga parabola in the morning. It was hard to hold the parabola on the bird in the wind - and yet this rig handles wind very well (no windgag on this recording)

great tit booting chaffinch from tree

Moved on Minsmere - was third on site so I got to hear the bearded tits over North Wall. These guys hate wind so I was surprised to hear them out so I snatched this recording using the MKE300D with furry windgag. They were about 50 -100yards away so I didn't figure I had much chance but I gave it a go anyway. There's a lot more rumble and noise on that recording, same amount of wind.

That's not a fair test of the 300 BTW - on here the lower recording is a blackbird about 30 yards away recorded with the handheld MKE300D under decent conditions.

ermine said:

If it's for clearer sonograms then you're probably best off going the whole way, particularly if you need the '67 for directionality. Not so sure about shotgun mics handling wind better than a dish though.

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I don't fancy struggling against the wind to keep a bird in the sight of the parabola - that is what I meant. We regularly get more than 8mph in the exposed glens and pinewoods ALL the time. I was out in January in a native pinewood and it was so still you could hear a pin drop - that is exceptional. The recordings were also very good, strong black signals.

I have also heard RSPB Telinga recordings that have the wind cover skelping against the mic producing a "doob" "doob" sound and that would bug me. I accept you don't always have to use one on it.

My recordings, in similar wind conditions, are comparable with your beared tit MKE300, certainly the noise is (!), although at that distance the MONOCOR appears to have more reach/signal. Maybe not. The Telinga great tit recording is very clear and impressive but then I would expect this from such a close range with a quality set up. The lack of wind noise is impressive and I know that Telinga boast this.

The closest you will get to a singing/tooping crossbill is generally dependent on how high the tree is. It varies, but usually 10-20m. In sheltered conditions this is good and close enough. Any more then it takes a lot of experience to ID them from a sonogram ( I don't need to - can do em by ear now, but need a scientific validation for publication ). Flight calls can be at 15m-whatever. The Fc signals on grams I get at 100m I can ID but that is from experience. To most people they would be unidentifiable.

I am interested in taking discrete frequency measurements from the sonograms hence need clearer signals. In the long term it will probably need to be a Telinga, but at the moment that is possibly not practical and certainly not affordable. I have got some amazing recordings with the modest equipment I have just from being 'out there', and in the right place at the right time, so portability is a definite pre-requiste.

Rob seems to have got good results ( in a scientific context at least) with the 67/k6 so I am very interested in that setup. However, it is easier to get closer to a singing chaffinch than a crossbill so that is something I need to weigh up.I am still considering the Telinga, but it is £800. I can get the SEN set up, inc. pistol grip, rycote gag for just over half that eg. sooner !


Linz

griffin said:

I am interested in taking discrete frequency measurements from the sonograms hence need clearer signals. In the long term it will probably need to be a Telinga, but at the moment that is possibly not practical and certainly not affordable. I have got some amazing recordings with the modest equipment I have just from being 'out there', and in the right place at the right time, so portability is a definite pre-requiste.

Linz

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well, in that case, I can recomment the RSPB plastic squirrelguard for £25 I kid you not - before the telinga I got me a CJ wildbird perspex see-through plastic squirrelguard. You can use the brass rod that comes with it to rubber-band your existing mic to it. I sawed the outer 1" off the squirrelguard periphery, and though it made it lighter, that was a mistake as it became a lot more wind-sensitive. I'd say leave it as it is if you can live with the weight.

CJ squirrel guard

The sound focus peak is indistinct, compared to the Telinga since this isn't a parabolic section. However, it is a darn sight better than nothing!. The diameter is only about a foot, so it's only good above 1kHz but it's smaller than the Telinga so easier to take through undergrowth and may be okay for your crossbills. You can't beat the price. It taught me the difference between using a shotgun mic and a parabola in that the parabola give you the gain before the noisy bit (the mic capsule) and kills off the reverberant field. Which is great for sonograms, though it can lead to a sterile sounding result from an aesthetic viewpoint because of the lack of reverberation.

You need a cardioid mic or an omni for that rig - a shotgun mic seems to need air the breathe which the dish won't give it. When I was messing about I was using a noname copy of the ATR55 on the low gain setting and you can see what a dish would do even with a cone of stiff paper or card - but you HAVE to try it outside. My first experiments were inside and I wondered what the hell all this parabolic dish lark was all about. Directional mics more than a cardioid seem to need air about them to work right.

Bearded tits aren't that loud, particularly when the wind is blowing them and their sound north away from me! I was pleasantly surprised that I got anything discernible at all from them yesterday.

Cheap Parabola

Wow - Very interesting - I like it !

What would you rec. as a cheapo (but decent) cardioid for this set-up ? On that cost I would be willing to have a go !

Cheers,

Linz

griffin said:

Wow - Very interesting - I like it !

What would you rec. as a cheapo (but decent) cardioid for this set-up ? On that cost I would be willing to have a go !

Cheers,

Linz

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Here are details and sound comparisons on my squirrelguard mic. That's using a seriously crappy dual cardioid/shotgun mic which is a Chinese knockoff of the ATR55. I estimate from measurements that the improvement in signal level at about 12dB - that is a straight 12dB improvement in gain without added noise. Listen for yourself. In today's 12mph wind, what also came through from this test was the massive improvement in wind noise immunity, and a very welcome step up in directionality over the shotgun mode of the mic. It shows again that a parabola is a heck of a lot better in wind that a shotgun mic, which is massively poorer than the cardioid mic setting - and when I took the mic apart the shotgun and the cardioid mic capsules were identical, just positioned differently. I might have to rethink my use of the MKE300D for the quick catch it and go sort of sound recording. Going fully tooled up with the Telinga is a bit much when sound recording is not the main aim of the game, but the squirrelguard is small enough to heft around a reserve to catch things like those bearded tits.

You might as well give it a go with the mic you already have. Omnis are okay, but in theory you lose some directionality. If you can handle a soldering iron you can't argue with the price of these though they're noisy as hell and not overly sensitive. Whatever you do, don't get a dynamic mic! They're a bad match to the MD input. The sort of crappy mics-on-a-stick you get with computers would also get you a feel for what the dish can do for you. Remember the noise level will be high - these things are designed down to a price for speech at 1 foot away. You'll still get a feel for the extra gain and directionality you could get.

Next step up is the Sennheiser ME64 that goes with the K6 module you're after. But you want to fool around with cheap rubbish to see if this gives you enough of what you need. Certainly if it's sonograms you want, a parabola seems to add a certain magic and clarity to that that I just don't see from my MKE300D. Don Kroodsma's book goes on about that at length, so I don't think this observation is just a quirk of my gear - Kroodsma's got the full works and three decades worth of experience in using his kit. On page 404 he says

Here's why I wouldn't be caught dead in the field with only a shotgun mike" and then carries on for two pages about how the 900x acoustic gain 'makes an important difference in the quality of sound recorded from any distance.

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He's a sonogram king, and ends up after his two pages of singing the praises of the dish with

the differences are readily seen in sonograms: A shotgun sonogram shows the trailing echoes and smudges after the bird's song, but the parabola sonagram is much sharper and crisper (almost all sonograms in this book are parabola songorams). So a Shotgun mike may record sounds as we hear them, with lots of natural reverb and echo, but the parabola captures the songs morel ike the bird sang them, as if reaching out and grabbing the sound directly from the bird's bill. I want the parabola.

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I enjoyed his book for it's sheer enthusiasm and from someone who knows their subject. For me it's a shame all the birds were American - it doesn't help me when he says this sounds like a chickadee because I've never knowingly heard one in the field!

ermine[URL=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618405682/megalistandiston/ said:

Don Kroodsma's book[/URL] goes on about that at length, so I don't think this observation is just a quirk of my gear - Kroodsma's got the full works and three decades worth of experience in using his kit. On page 404 he says He's a sonogram king, and ends up after his two pages of singing the praises of the dish with

I enjoyed his book for it's sheer enthusiasm and from someone who knows their subject. For me it's a shame all the birds were American - it doesn't help me when he says this sounds like a chickadee because I've never knowingly heard one in the field!

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I'm not good with birdsong, but loved Don K's book. Made me want to get a Parabola / mic also!

Hi Ermine,

Thanks again for your enthusiasm and help. I reckon I will give it a go, and in the long term save up for a Pro 5W Twin Science ( £802-ouch ! ).

I do have Kroodsma's book, and did read the quote about 900x mag and that is always at the back of my mind, particularly with crossbill flight calls and distant toops. However, he also praises the portability of a shotgun and mini disc. Guess I need both !

Will let you know ( through the forum so it will help others too ) if I have any probs. !

Cheers,

Lindsay

I'll own up to being (I think) the "professional" biologist mentioned in the first post on this thread (sorry I didn't read it earlier). As I mentioned in a previous thread, you shouldn't read much into my preference for gun mikes over parabolas, and you *certainly* shouldn't weigh my expertise higher simply because its part of my job. First that's because there's no reason why amateur recorders can't learn more about recording than professional ones, and second because the goals of biologist recorders might not be yours:
1) As a field biologist, I'm more concerned with collecting a large quantity of decent recordings than a few brilliant recordings.
2) For measurements, some recording artefacts, like hissy, or low frequency noise are less important than others, like the compression errors introduced by algorithms. For aesthetic appreciation, this may be the other way around.

Having said this, I think that, as far as I am aware, the acoustic differences between parabolas and shotguns boil down to the following: 1) The amplification abilities of parameters are greater than shotguns; 2) shotguns have a narrower focus than parabolas; 3) neither 1 nor 2 are absolute differences, and like most things in life, you get what you pay for; 4) in the field, I find Sennheiser shotgun mics much easier to travel with, avoid scaring birds with, and (although I've heard the opposite) that they perform better in windy conditions than Telinga parabolas. That's just me, and Don Kroodsma is *without a doubt* a more experienced recordist than me

Finally, with respect to echoes in spectrograms: I am currently finishing up a bioacoustics analysis program that includes an echo removal algorithm (motivated by the fact that our ears do a much better job of this than do basic spectrograms). Here's an example of what it does: two spectrograms of a chaffinch song before and after echo removal (a fairly crappy recording of an Azorean chaffinch using Sennheiser ME67 + Marantz PMD-670, spectrogram parameters: 5ms frame length, 2ms time step, 40dB dynamic range). What do you think?

oh, and by the way, I'd like to plug the book co-edited by one of my colleagues here: "Nature's Music", Slabbekoorn, H. & Marler, P. eds. [I'm not getting paid for the plug ;-) ]
Seriously, though, its a book written in honour of Luis Baptista who sadly died unexpectedly, and might have been one of the few bird song biologists to challenge Don Kroodsma simply as a recordist. It's aimed at a general audience, and has contributions from most of the major research groups.

lachlustre said:

.......the goals of biologist recorders might not be yours:
1) As a field biologist, I'm more concerned with collecting a large quantity of decent recordings than a few brilliant recordings.
2) For measurements, some recording artefacts, like hissy, or low frequency noise are less important than others, like the compression errors introduced by algorithms. For aesthetic appreciation, this may be the other way around....

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These are my goals too, so will probably still heed your advice ( if that is okay ! ). Already have thousands of crossbill calls. There are a few sites that I could lug a parabola about, but for most it is too unpractical, esp.when carrying scope, camera etc. I have got on really well with a crappy short shot gun so think the ME67 will be an improvement. Will not blame you if I it isn't ! :-O

Cheers,

Linz

lachlustre said:

oh, and by the way, I'd like to plug the book co-edited by one of my colleagues here: "Nature's Music", Slabbekoorn, H. & Marler, P. eds. [I'm not getting paid for the plug ;-) ]

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Crikey, fifty quid - good old Reed Elsevier doing their stuff! Looks interesting enough, but that'll have to come down a bit to reach a wider audience :-C

and (although I've heard the opposite) that they perform better in windy conditions than Telinga parabolas.

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This puzzles me. My dealings with mics are that they get much more sensitive to wind as they increase in directionality, with one glorious exception. The Telinga parabola - I have the windguard, but don't generally use it as you can't see through the dish then and wind isn't normally a problem with it.

It could be, of course, that I am only using rubbish shotgun mics. The Sennheiser MKE300D is not total rubbish, but not in the league of the ME series. My MKH40 cardioid, which is in that league, is not good in the kind of wind we had today even with a Rycote softie. (It looks like East Anglia and the Netherlands were much the same wind.)

So are you saying you can go out in the field on a day like today with a 35kph+ wind with a ME67, and not lose your recording? Do you use something like this or the full Rycote wind basket + furry cover?

I would like to have the option of using a shotgun - from an aesthetic point of view a shotgun mic gives a tone colour similar to that which we hear. From observation it seems birds seem to hear the reverberant field of their own song and sometimes use it. At work we have two L shaped buildings with a lot of glass, and a car park between them. Two robins have taken up residence, and sing antiphonally, each from a tree/bush in the focus of the L of their particular building. There are enough bushes around the car park to make it remarkable that they have chosen a position to amplify their song with the buildings

You seem to have a good solution to the issue of picking up the reverberant field muddying your sonograms, that looks like it works well. Do you have the same philosophical issue that lossy compression raises - how do you know you do not throw away something of significance in the process and/or generate artifacts in the sonogram?

ermine said:

Crikey, fifty quid - good old Reed Elsevier doing their stuff! Looks interesting enough, but that'll have to come down a bit to reach a wider audience :-C

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Well, I'll ask Hans if/when the paperback version is coming out - I got a slightly reduced copy ;-) . It is typical of academic publishers that a bunch of scientists get together and make a concerted effort to make a book aimed at much at the general public as each other, and they charge 50 quid for it... /RANT

ermine said:

So are you saying you can go out in the field on a day like today with a 35kph+ wind with a ME67, and not lose your recording? Do you use something like this or the full Rycote wind basket + furry cover?

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Well today may have been pushing it, but basically yes, I found that in more extreme conditions I got usable if not great recordings with the shotgun. I found it hard with the Telinga (eg recording the chaffinches on Orkney) to hold it still, and to keep the wind guard tight enough to stop it banging around and into the microphone. And I got horrible results without the wind muffler. Maybe it is the case that the Telinga is better under light wind conditions? I am now using the Sennheiser own brand 'professional' wind muffler - we have the whole Rycote system in the lab, but I haven't done a comparison with it.

ermine said:

At work we have two L shaped buildings with a lot of glass, and a car park between them. Two robins have taken up residence, and sing antiphonally, each from a tree/bush in the focus of the L of their particular building. There are enough bushes around the car park to make it remarkable that they have chosen a position to amplify their song with the buildings

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That's a great anecdote, and I'll pass it on to Hans actually, since he has been talking about a similar phenomenon he observed on a university campus.

ermine said:

You seem to have a good solution to the issue of picking up the reverberant field muddying your sonograms, that looks like it works well. Do you have the same philosophical issue that lossy compression raises - how do you know you do not throw away something of significance in the process and/or generate artifacts in the sonogram?

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Yes you do have the same general issue of losing information. It doesn't work miracles, that's for sure. Since I get paid for this, I have the time to actually go out and run some tests: playing back signals and seeing how the algorithms cope with recordings. For most tonal songs it seems to be working very well (given that it is really a very simple algorithm indeed).
The reason for developing the algorithm is that with whatever equipment you are using, you will get some reverberations in recordings made in wooded areas without nice edges. Thus the data that you are analyzing is almost definitely quite flawed; the question is how to make the best of a bad job.

One thing to note: how many times have you made what seemed to be a decent recording to your ears, and then gone back and found a disappointing amount of reverberation? Those are the types of recordings I'm trying to improve.

I think that overall given the unavoidable imperfections introduced by field recordings, scientists do get a little carried away by the problems of compressed recordings: most birds have rather similar acoustic perception to us, really, and therefore the compression should do less damage.
Only one exception comes to mind: this was the finding that a species of hummingbird makes noises at the limit of ultrasound (would have been missed by lossy techniques, I guess). Of course this is still a bit of a mystery because it is also believed that the humingbirds can't perceive these sounds...

lachlustre said:

Finally, with respect to echoes in spectrograms: I am currently finishing up a bioacoustics analysis program that includes an echo removal algorithm (motivated by the fact that our ears do a much better job of this than do basic spectrograms). Here's an example of what it does: two spectrograms of a chaffinch song before and after echo removal (a fairly crappy recording of an Azorean chaffinch using Sennheiser ME67 + Marantz PMD-670, spectrogram parameters: 5ms frame length, 2ms time step, 40dB dynamic range). What do you think?

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That works pretty good. Echo traces can be problematic in crossbill flight calls in particular - it can "appear" to turn a Fc2 Parrot into a Fc3 Scottish by seemingly adding components that are diagnostic in taxonomic classification. However, in the case of loxia, an experienced analyst will not be conned by these ghost traces - though they can be annoying if taking parameter measurements. Someone sitting with the published graphs and their own sonogram of a xbill - well that is a different matter unless it is a 'typical', clear call ! I prefer "raw" sonograms, warts and all with no processing. As long as the features are black and strong I am chuffed. I would be interested in your prog though !

On the note of birds using geographic features for acoustic effect I frequently hear crossbills (mainly Scottish, but sometimes Common ) flying over a loch that is surrounded by trees at a particular study site. They could just be using it as a flight marker, but I reckon they are enjoying the reflection of their calls bouncing back off the water, and echoing within the 'hollow' of the wood.

Linz

griffin said:

That works pretty good. Echo traces can be problematic in crossbill flight calls in particular - it can "appear" to turn a Fc2 Parrot into a Fc3 Scottish by seemingly adding components that are diagnostic in taxonomic classification. However, in the case of loxia, an experienced analyst will not be conned by these ghost traces - though they can be annoying if taking parameter measurements. Someone sitting with the published graphs and their own sonogram of a xbill - well that is a different matter unless it is a 'typical', clear call ! I prefer "raw" sonograms, warts and all with no processing. As long as the features are black and strong I am chuffed. I would be interested in your prog though !

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I'd love to try out my program on some of these calls if you would like to share your recordings. Another way to test the versatility of what I am doing!

lachlustre said:

One thing to note: how many times have you made what seemed to be a decent recording to your ears, and then gone back and found a disappointing amount of reverberation? Those are the types of recordings I'm trying to improve.

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Sometimes these are the ones with the magic, from an aesthetic standpoint. I come a little bit more from the soundscape approach, and often it is the interplay between species or individuals which brings a smile. It's a pity the site where I work suffers badly from noise from a highway 500m away and the HVAC system. It is some way out in fields and last year there was a group of four chaffys almost in a square separated by at a guess 100m each. They sang antiphonally and it would have made a great surround recording or binaural recording. These guys would keep it up for ten minutes at a time at their peak.

Interplay recordings tend to need hardly any wind and broader capture. I recorded a great tit
booting a chaffinch out of a tree which somewhat loses the point because the parabola was way too directional. There again, the wind was high so that I wouldn't have got anything otherwise. It is good to hear that there may be hope - on my MKH30/40 I use simply a Rycote softie so that is only good to about 8kph wind, but it sounds like the full basket version may have a lot to offer me - at a price!

That's a great anecdote, and I'll pass it on to Hans actually, since he has been talking about a similar phenomenon he observed on a university campus.

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A chaffinch has recently taken up residence on a pine tree and it sounds to me like he is using the main 5 storey office building as a soundboard. There aren't many chaffys that have started singing from one location yet, and he has chosen a site which suffers from more human disturbance than many others available within 200m. He could get a lot more peace in the trees 500m away. So I do wonder if birds do use the natural acoustics of the environment for their advantage. Maybe in a similar way as we need to hear ourselves to speak correctly, and it is as hard to speak in a acoustic laboratory where there is no reverberation. Whether that sort of thing really happens in the bird 'mind' is up to you guys to work out - I just listen, and it may be that this amplification by natural reverberation strikes me as particularly unusual because the situation is not common